Sisters are doing it for themselves

AS MORE FILMS FEATURE FEMALE ACTION STARS, WOMEN ARE RISING TO THE CHALLENGE OF PERFORMING THEIR OWN STUNTS

For decades, action sequences in films that featured women have been performed by stunt men in wigs. But women have been increasingly asking why they shouldn’t get a shot at being the all-action heroes too.

As a result, stunt schools such as Campus Univers Cascades (CUC) in northern France have seen a growing number of female trainees. Now, a third of all the students at CUC, which considers itself to be the biggest stunt training school in the world, are currently women.

They learn to brawl, fight, leap from buildings and helicopters, run over buildings using parkour and many other physically taxing and highly technical skills that allow them to inhabit the characters of the superheroes and kickass women we see on screen. Stunts don’t just take strength but also choreography, and students also gain the ability to calculate risk so they can execute a dangerous stunt safely.

The practice of ‘wigging’ is still common, as the pool of trained stuntwomen is small. But demand for women with their skillset in performing stunts is high, and students are often snapped up for jobs in film, both in European cinema and in Hollywood, before they finish the course.

Maureen Lavoyer, a stunt performer and former student of the school, hopes wigging will soon be a thing of the past. “Women are finding they can surpass their own and others’ expectations,” she says. “Plus, if you love cinema, why wouldn’t you want a piece of the action?”